Why Support is so Important - and how to get it | Life and Path Episode 6
Welcome to the Life and Power podcast. I'm Danlye Jones. And today we are talking about why support is so important. And if you don't have enough of it, how you can get it to deal with the things that are going on in your life. So if you are going through a stressful time, especially a maximum stress time, a family member is dealing with something that is hard for you to deal with, like alcoholism or some other issue.
Shame and Secrets
And it makes you feel shame because you don't want to be associated with that. You're in a toxic job. You just went through a breakup, the death of a loved one. Sometimes we have this tendency, especially if you're like me, to go inward, to try and handle it, to try and fix it on your own. And it is so lonely to be in that place.
So Why Haven't You Told Anyone?
And so I have a question for you. If something is going on in your life, who have you told not? Who can fix this for you? Because that's not what we're looking for. But who have you told? Is there someone in your life that you can think of right now that you trust, that you haven't told? And why not?
Studies Prove That Social Support Strengthens Stress Resilience
And having a quality support system isn't just was nice to have thing the studies prove it. The studies prove that it helps enhance our resilience to stress. And don't we all need that? Don't we all need help with that? I know I do. I know I will take anything I can to reduce the stress in my life, or at least make it feel like it is less crushing.
Study Cited: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2921311/
Real Life Examples
And that's what quality support does. So I want to give you a couple examples from my life to help illustrate it. So last year I had a family member that was going through some stuff and I felt really alone in it, and I felt really like I had to handle it and like I had to sort of be like the bed for what was going on with them. And I was having my own feelings about it and trying to deal with it and trying to work through it. But for a while I just didn't tell anybody outside of my family. Like I didn't tell friends. And I was like, I need to I need to sort this. Something I did differently then was I was like, No, this isn't a thing for me to feel ashamed about.
What Happened When I Reached Out
I started to detach my shame from it and reached out to a friend and said, Hey, I just need to tell you this. I don't need you to do anything, but I just need someone to hear that this is going on in my life. And I sent them a text and I told them what was going on. And I got a really kind and thoughtful text back from them. And I felt heard and I felt better. And the feeling that was over me lost its power. And I told another friend same thing. The feeling that was over me lost its power and my friends knew what I was dealing with when I was with them. And I think that helped formulate a context for our interactions, right? Like, this is a thing I'm dealing with doing the best I can.
We didn't spend time sitting deeply in it, but it was just known and I felt supported and I felt like I had given that vulnerability to them and the relationships got closer. Another example. I was dealing with something professionally that sucked and it was hard. And it was it was meant to be something and formulated in a way that was something that I was dealing with.
You Don't Need to Feel Alone
And I took that on like, Hey, this is my responsibility. I am dealing with this. I need to figure a way out. I confided in a friend of what was going on and I still kept it close and I still held on to it and felt shame around it, felt anger. And then I started to tell more trusted friends like what was going on, how I was feeling.
And instead of me feeling like, I need to solve this. This is my problem. It was like, that happened to you. Danlye and that sucks. And it was so liberating. Like, it sounds very simple, but it was so great to have somebody mirror back to you that like, no, that, that sucks. That that's going on for you.
That should not be going on. And it took me from this place of I feel so alone in this. I feel like I have to handle it all. I have to have this armor up and hold it in silence to know we've got your back. To me feeling like, there it's more than just me here. And although this is still not a position I want to be in, people have your back.
Shame Isolates Us - Break The Cycle
And I think we forget how much shame is meant to isolate how much we can tend to go. Especially me, my personality type. When something is wrong, I just want to go in. I just want to fix it. I want to make it better and come out and just keep swimming right? And I just want to say a huge shout out to the women in my life for standing with me over this last six months when things got hard.
I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful for every one of them for being there with me in whatever capacity they could be. I'm speechless. Like, it really was a great feeling. That said, it wasn't always easy to confide in my friends. I felt a lot of shame growing up about the situation that I was in growing up in poverty.
We kept a lot of secrets in our family. We didn't tell when things were going wrong to just have a face of We've got this. And that's taken a lot of unlearning. I am still unlearning that, and I think it's cost me friendships over the years. It's cost me understanding people vulnerably, being able to be there for them as well as them be there for me.
Friendships Deepen Through Vulnerability
But even some of the friendships that I've had for years haven't deepened until I've done the work, until I started going to therapy and normalizing, talking about the things that are going on with me, like for real, the things that are going on with me. And I'm saying that to you because if you are feeling like I don't I don't have this connection with people, I don't have these people, I can trust it maybe that the folks around you are people that you can trust.
What if You Don't Have a Network?
So if that's you and you feel down because you're like, I don't have this support network around me, I got you. There are things that you can do outside of having these friends to help yourself feel supported. And when you feel supported, you can make these friends, you can see these opportunities, and it might be a little harder than when you were in your twenties.
But dang, you can see people for who they are. The quality is out there, people are there fully formed selves. Yeah, we're all busy with our kids and we're busy with our careers and lives, but we all desire connection, Everyone desires connection. We all think we're going out here and we're alone. And sometimes we think we're the only ones and we're not.
Everyone Wants to Feel Seen
Everyone wants to feel something like they want to feel their soul touched. They want to feel vulnerable. They want to feel true connection. And so it is out there for you. Others are seeking. Others have grown through things and there is a fresh set of people just for you that want that mutual connection, that want to share their vulnerabilities, that want you to share your vulnerabilities with them so you guys can work through things together.
So just take heart if you're feeling like I don't I don't have this, I know I need it, but I'm frickin lonely right now. Like it's there for you. And I'll get to some of the ways that you can start to build those things later in the podcast. And the science is also clear on those of us that have a tendency to isolate when we're stress, like hands up my fellow introverts.
Study on Isolation and Depression
One study says that isolation is a result of anxiety and depression, and some people use it as a self-induced coping mechanism. Like my tendency we talked about earlier is I've got this. I'm not going to be anyone else's problem. But the kind of gross and shameful feelings you have, they throw drive in the dark when we're stressed. Some of when we're stressed, some of us, myself included, tend to just go into that isolation mode first.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8149428/#:~:text=Isolation%20is%20a%20result%20of,worry%20and%20avoid%20human%20interaction.
You Deserve Connection and Help
And as I was dealing with some things, having my therapist in there was huge for me because it was someone that I could trust that was completely untangled from the situation I was in and I had told her about my discomfort with confiding some of the things that were going on, and she said, Danlye, you deserve to vent.
You deserve to have people know what's going on and support you. And it sounds so simple, but it was such a revelation to me that, yeah, I, I know it feels good when people are there to support, but for her to just say you deserve to have people supporting you was kind of a revelation to me. And it was a really important point and it helped me kind of call out those unconscious feelings of of shame, of of sharing, of those things that my family unit and generations ago in my family unit, they didn't share.
We just worked through it on our own. We just pulled ourselves up. We just went through it. We didn't share our trauma with people, but we were there to absorb it. Everybody else's drama like, that's not healthy. We are not as women just here for everybody else to stress on and dump on and take all of that in and not get any support in return like that.
That is not the way that this is supposed to work. Our feelings are valid, our feelings, our anger is valid, and it needs a place to go. Now, you you are conscious of this, right? You have probably been around people that have taken advantage of your time have not vented, but just continually used you as a dumping ground for their feelings and walked away.
I have a feeling that you are not that type of person if you are venting to someone. It's a reciprocal relationship. You want nothing more than to help them. So if you're aware of it, you're not doing that. I would just want to say that if you are aware of how that person feels again, you're not like that person, and it is okay to build those healthy relationships.
So if you are going through something, text a friend and let them know, Hey, I just want you to hear what's going on. I don't need you to do anything. Or maybe you do, but just let them know I want someone else to know what's going on. Call them. Go for a walk with them. Whatever it is that helps you get that out.
Do it. Don't control what they do. What they say. Need nothing out of it other than for what you're going through to come to the light of day, to reduce shame, to get rid of that feeling that you're completely alone. Because once you tell them, you're no longer completely alone. And for those of you that don't have those friends right now, especially if you're going through a growth phase.
Things You Can Do While You're Building Your Network of Friends
So if you are going through a phase where you know you're shedding some things in your life, you know that there's people that maybe don't work for you anymore. There's people that give you kind of an IC feeling like I can't really be my full self with them. That's okay. Like, I have gone through this these phases, I've gone through these phases.
We all go through them sometime. So I want to talk specifically to you. If you're going through something like that, there are methods that can help you and I 100% recommend therapy if therapy is not available to you for financial reasons, many therapists have sliding scales. Take a step. Contact one today. Try to find someone that can be an ear for you in a healthy way.
The best thing about therapy for me has been learning how to communicate things and have them be met with me, feeling seen with me, feeling heard, validating, or even invalidating emotions. So if I'm having a negative feeling about myself, my therapist might ask me like, what? What? What's going on with that? And I'm often startled. Like, what? What do you mean, what's going on with like, that's just, that's I, I feel bad about X-Y-Z.
And she's like, well, let's unpack that. And so you learn the stuff that's going on in the back of your head. It starts to come to the surface. You're telling a person who kind of gets all of that information that others wouldn't get. And I know when you grow up in a situation where you don't feel like you can trust people with your emotions, that is hard and it's hard to go to therapy, but it's better than you think.
I went through a couple of therapists, but even the first one that I went to wasn't awesome. But I learned and and for the situation I was in postpartum, it was great to have her there. So reach out and find someone. Another thing that you can do is journal. So journaling is a great way to get out all the thoughts that you're thinking and get them out of your head.
Get a notebook, a simple notebook, favorite pencil or pen, and write out a page of what's going on. All the stupid things, all the weird things. Write it out, get it out of your head. It it can be very silly. And this is just a journal entry. This isn't a story. This isn't a work of fiction. It is to get it out of your head and you can get rid of it and destroy it as soon as you're done.
But it needs to get out of your head in the spirit of building that good social network. What are you into right now that you can go to a place and meet other people that are into that too? So it could be painting, It could be. I'm into computers right now, I'm into whatever, find a meet up and go and meet other people.
Could even be a professional organization. If you're meeting other people and doing an activity with other people, you're building relationships. So whatever phase you're in and building your social network in telling your social network what's going on, I want you to know that you're not alone. There is some kind of support out there for you and our brains lie to us and tell us that we don't deserve support, that we will overwhelm people, that we have enough within us and we can do it ourselves.
Don't listen to those lies. You know, sometimes we go inward, sometimes we do that, But often having somebody walking with us through the hard stuff is so powerful and magnifies the good in who we are and mirrors that we are good humans deserving of love, deserving of help. And that's where I want you to get. I want you to feel deserving of love, deserving of help, and deserving of a strong network to support you.
Outro & Disclaimer
You've got this. So until next time, I'm Danlye Jones. This is a Life and Path podcast. I hope you have an amazing day. Before we finish up here, a disclaimer. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. It is not intended as a replacement for seeing your doctor or for seeing your therapist for going to therapy. Valuable things that you should have in your life and have active relationships with your doctor and therapist.
